Dante at 700

This September 14th is the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, the greatest poet in all of western literature.

I am not sure where to go from there with this post. There is so much I would like to say, but I am not quite sure how to put it all together in a logical way that fully expresses my feelings about Dante without sounding trite. So much has been written over the past seven hundred years that you could easily spend the rest of your life reading about Dante without ever reading his actual work. Has it all been said? Is there anything new to say about Dante?

I have two somewhat unrelated points to make concerning Dante. The initial point I will address in this post, with the second in the next. As I have noted above, Dante Alighieri is the greatest poet in all of western literature. Erich Auerbach, touted by some to be the twentieth-century greatest scholar-critic, said there is Dante and then everyone else. When you consider the scope of Dante’s work, the time in which he created it, and the impact it has had on the world, you could hardly disagree with Auerbach. Dante has no equal.

Typically, when someone challenges me on Dante’s incontrovertible superiority, they will offer Shakespeare as an alternative. I believe this objection is more of a case of bias for the English language than any substantive argument. Understand, I love Shakespeare. In the movie Spinal Tap, there is an amplifier whose volume goes to eleven, not just ten like most amps. The film explains that it is a notch louder than ten. It is just like that with Dante. Sure, Shakespeare is a ten, but Dante is a twelve or maybe thirteen. He is two or three notches above Shakespeare.

Shakespeare wrote thirty-eight plays (thirty-seven by some counts) and collaborated on several others. He also wrote roughly a hundred and fifty-four sonnets. While these works are, for the most part, masterpieces, he wrote to entertain. We can draw lessons from his works because Shakespeare’s genius was in reflecting human nature well. Dante was more than a poet. The purpose of his work is to instruct, to inform. I was once asked if The Divine Comedy was theology, philosophy, or history. My answer was yes. From the very beginning, commentaries on Dante’s work discussed how he married these three with poetry. In the fifteenth century, in some circles, “Dante is hailed as  a religious prophet, in still others, he is the man who yokes together science and theology.”[1]

When Shakespeare wrote, there was an England. When Dante wrote, there was no Italy. He was the first to see Italy as a nation. Granted, what he had envisioned was somewhat different from Italy today; he was the first to think of the peninsula’s population as a single people. Nevertheless, his work was the falling of the first stone in an avalanche that resulted in Italian unification. His writings, his Divine Comedy’s powerful story of liberation, inspired a people to free themselves of foreign oppression.

More importantly, the echo of Dante’s call to freedom has reverberated around the world.  In his work Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa points out that “this great liberator is not for Italians only. His message reaches ‘all the nations’ …Dante’s liberating ‘sound’ was indeed heard clear across the ocean… In American abolitionist circles, Dante held a place on par with none less than Lincoln.” Dante has made a substantive difference more than just in the lives of Italians but the entire western world.  

Once, an acquaintance argued Shakespeare’s superiority because so many English expressions came from Shakespeare’s plays. That is correct. There are many things that we say on an almost daily basis that are directly attributable to Shakespeare. However, in comparison to Dante, those are pretty small potatoes. The Italian language is what it is because of Dante. Some have gone so far as to call him the father of the Italian language. By writing in the Tuscan vernacular, Dante’s eloquence raised the dialect above all other candidate regional languages. Ernst Pulgram states in his book The Tongues of Italy, “I should venture to say that without Dante, at least, Tuscan would have no greater chance than Roman or Neapolitan or Lombard.” Therefore, it was only natural that those who defined standard Italian would choose Tuscan.

Dante is an essential attribute of Italian culture. It would be challenging to imagine Italy without Dante, and, by transference, it would not be easy to imagine Western Culture without Italy.

In my next post, I will address why The Divine Comedy has had such resonance over these past seven centuries.

For more on Dante see my book; Italianità: The Essence of Being Italian and Italian-American

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[1] Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Critical Essays on Dante, G.K. Hall & Co., 1991